In the wake of the continual development of computer technology, users are becoming increasingly reliant on information that is stored in large quantities by computer systems. Search engines, which are now in wide use, aim to help users to conduct searches among large volumes of information and to obtain useful information in a quick and convenient manner. Search engines have achieved great success in the information search field and a great number of beneficial search techniques have been developed and adopted. The technical improvements and optimizations to various search engines have been directly reflected in optimized search results.
The typical search method for e-commerce website search engines is as follows: keywords of search queries input by a user at an e-commerce website are received; product information matching the keywords is obtained; the product information is ranked as search results; and lastly, the ranked search results are output at a display for the user.
To improve search accuracy, an e-commerce search engine may adopt some search ranking strategies to aid users in rapidly finding the product information that they need. One example of a typical search ranking technique of product information that matches a user's search query may be ranked based on index term weights and combined scores for product information and sellers. The “index” referred to is a search engine index, where webpages are indexed in advance of searches based on the data that is included in each webpage. Combined scores for product information and sellers may be determined based on assigning scores to words, phrases, names of people, concepts, letters, characters, numbers, and other such values that are associated with each piece of product information and then determining a combined score for each matching piece of product information. Another example of a typical search ranking of product information that matches a user's search query may be ranked based on index term weights and the single dimension of a product's price or the sales volume of a certain product.
To summarize, typical search ranking strategies currently used by e-commerce website search engines primarily include: a ranking technique that is based on a combination of factors such as product information title keywords, price, transaction quantity, seller scores, and various other measures. However, one drawback of typical search ranking strategies is that they generally rank product information without considering individual user differences. In other words, typical search ranking strategies will typically return the same search results for User A and User B if User A and User B simply input the same keywords into the e-commerce website search engine. But, as individuals, different users may have different preferences. Thus, inevitably, different users are very likely to have different consumer behaviors, and consequently different users will expect different search results.